Movie notes: No one loves ‘Wanderlust,’ ‘Gone’

From the penthouse to the outhouse in a span of 24 hours. Yesterday, the topic was wonderful, Oscar-winning movies like “The Artist” and “Hugo.” Today, it’s time to play catchup on the less-than-stellar crop of movies that opened last Friday while playing hide-’n'-seek with critics.

The results can be summed up thusly:

Critics hated “Act of Valor” and “Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds,” which had Tomatometer scores of 30 and 27, respectively. They REALLY hated “Gone,” whose 12 score almost immediately puts it in the running for worst-of-2012 lists.

And they’ve been going back and forth on “Wanderlust,” which opened barely in Fresh territory (60 is the cutoff) on Thursday, slipped into Rotten Land over the weekend and got its head back above water Monday with a 62 score.

Audiences, however didn’t have much trouble making up their minds. They flocked to “Act of Valor” and ignored “Wanderlust” and “Gone.” Meanwhile, Tyler Perry’s latest fared about as well as his usual non-Madea films, which is to say, not great.

Obviously, all the publicity about exactly how naked is Jennifer Aniston didn’t help “Wanderlust,” the fish-out-of-water comedy about a downsized New York couple stumbling into a hippie commune. The film was an asbolute bomb, making a pathetic $6.5 million, which was way short of the extremely modest $10 million projections for its opening weekend. It opened lower than Aniston romantic-comedy duds “The Switch” and “Love Happens.”

“For whatever reason, it never seemed like Universal (the studio) really got behind the movie,” BoxOfficeMojo’s Ray Subers wrote, adding that the marketing campaign never got off the ground. Maybe EVERYONE should have gotten naked. (Wait…Alan Alda is in the cast. Strike that!)

“Gone,” Amanda Seyfried’s serial-killer thriller, did even worse. It’s $4.8 million opening was the year’s worst for a wide release. This one was no surprise, though, since the studio, Summit Entertainment, did almost no PR. I finally saw a TV commerial on cable this weekend — a day after it opened.

“Act of Valor,” on the other hand, may not have wowed critics, but it wowed audiences. Despite a no-star cast (have you heard? it was made with real, active-duty Navy SEALs), it made $24.5 million opening weekend, earning the No. 1 spot. That’s great for a war movie, and almost as much as the other three new movies combined.

And maybe even his niche audience is getting a bit, uh, nich-ier — Perry’s “Good Deeds” earned only $15.6 million, his second worst behind “Daddy’s Little Girls” ($11.2 million). Subers: “It’s possible that Perry’s brand has lost some of its luster.”

Perhaps it would help if he tried to expand thast audience, which has been overwhelmingly African American. You know what might help? Screening his movies in advance for critics.